While publishers, labels, artists, distributors and other industry heavyweights debated and attempted to sway the course of Year II of the post-Napster world during the first day of the Future of Music Conference in cold and rainy Washington Monday, Loudeye Technologies and Audible Magic Corp. were aiming to convince the conferees at Georgetown University that its digital music tracking and management solution solves many of the complex issues surrounding the distribution of digital music.

Paramount among those issues has been, of course, money: how much and who gets it. The courts and the Copyright Office have made those determinations to at least the extent that the major publishing labels are now rushing to implement online music distribution systems.

But the lack of standards, incompatible systems, inaccurate song information, the cost and complexity of in-house deployments, and the sheer volume of music transactions that need to be managed make this a challenging problem.

Loudeye, the Seattle-based powerhouse provider of services and infrastructure for the delivery of digital media and streaming content, thinks it new partnership with Audible Magic, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based provider of content-based identification (CBID) technologies, can solve the problem.

Loudeye is contributing major portions of its extensive digital music archive system and metadata database, which includes content from both major and independent labels, its scalable and extensible media data center and its hosting and network infrastructure.

These are integrated in a solution that includes Audible Magic's advanced CBID technologies for accurately identifying and tracking music or speech from digital sources such as files and Internet streams, as well as analog sources such as terrestrial radio and TV broadcasts, without the use of watermarks.

The solution represents a back-end system that the two companies hope will meet the specialized needs of music service providers, content owners and global rights organizations.

Loudeye says the system independently monitors and generates accurate reports of digital music usage and performances; functions across multiple devices, platforms and networks; integrates into existing systems; and scales to handle the high volumes of consumer music usage across all broadcast, peer-to-peer and subscription service models.

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The two companies also boast of cost savings of 20-40 percent when compared to the use of multiple point technologies and in-house developed solutions.

"This joint offering represents an important step in providing a comprehensive system that we believe addresses many of the challenges faced by the music industry in developing a viable market for authorized usage of digital music," said John T. Baker, Loudeye chairman and chief executive officer, before the conference began. "This solution is capable of non-intrusively and accurately identifying a wide range of audio content and provides the industry with critical and much-needed media services."

The initial implementation utilizes major portions of Loudeye's music information database to generate a digital fingerprint library using Audible Magic's audio identification technology. The fingerprint library is integrated with Loudeye's track-level metadata to create what Loudeye calls the "industry's most comprehensive reference database for music identification."

Audible Magic's CBID technologies monitor digital music usage and performances, comparing such activity against the reference database to accurately identify each song to a master recording, copyright owner and artist.

Audible Magic will receive database updates on a continuous basis as new song information is added to Loudeye's catalogue, and officials from both companies anticipate it will rapidly expand to include Loudeye's complete music information database, which spans nearly the entire North American music catalog.

"Our comprehensive music identification technology, combined with Loudeye's extensive metadata, enables us to offer the media industry trusted and practical solutions for digital content tracking and management," said Vance Ikezoye, president and CEO of Audible Magic. "This solution can be deployed immediately to help copyright holders and artists benefit from the growth in use of digital music."